Impact study shows climbing damages ecosytems

[Dru]

Re Global warming and Sea Level Rise.

Ya those Belgians, Dutch, Naurans, Maldivians etc. are gonna be pissed when their countries go underwater. But we are only gonna complain when they show up at our crags cause theirs are underwater, and spend all weekend taking the TRs on Mountaineers Dome that we wanted to TR...

Man if it was the USA that was gonna be completely destroyed by 3rd World pollution you can just bet that Bush and Blair would be in their with bombs and guns... but when it is the other way around and the 1st World is essentially going to completely destroy a few small countries to the point of rendering them uninhabitable (except by dolphins) no one here gives a shit.

I dont have an SUV... I have a car...Ok its got 4wd. Ok its a subaru. When are they gonna make an off road capable fuel cell car anyways?

[Country_Jake]

I'd be interested in bio-fuel if I new what it was... where can I find some info as I'm buying a new truck at the end of the year.. And I have no problems with desil trucks, my only problem with enviormentaly friendly veicals is that the pussy three cylinder/elctic motors produce about as much horsepower as my ferkin' electric pocket pussy....

[Country_Jake]

Hey Dru maybe your right about the Dolphins being the smartest creatures... maybe, just maybe GW is their covert plan to take over the world...

[sayjay]

Bio-diesel is what I was talking about. bio-diesel=diesel produced from plant waste.They're about to build a plant in eastern Washington to produce it.Unfortunately it is more $$ per gallon than regular diesel or gas, and is not yet widely available. I know of one distributor in Seattle and he says he has lots of customers who drive the new VW diesels, which he thinks are the cat's meow. Great mileage, and burn much cleaner than old diesels. Get ~60mpg on biodiesel. I don't know about trucks. If you really are interested, PM me and I'll give you his name/#. (He's a car mechanic, btw).

Yeah, the options for fuel-efficient vehicles are not great. That's why the gov't needs to be pushed to get the alternative fuels technology more advanced. If we subsidized alternatives the way we subsidize fossil fuel there would be a lot more options--

Guess everyone's gotta make this choice for themselves; I just think people should be making the choice w/ a full set of information about the impacts of their choices.

[MtnGoat]

"You give me a list of scientists who think global warming is not a real and significant problem I'll give you back a list that is at least 100 times as long."

Trouble is, reality isn't up for a vote. When that list was "who thinks the earth is flat", there was a time when it was also 100% of "scientists". Ditto for the expansion of the universe, or continental drift. Make your case based on data, not how many buy it.

[sayjay]

Couldn't agree with you more, Mtn Goat. And the evidence is that it is a real and it's a problem.

What sucks is that I hear this all the time: "oh, it's still up for debate, cause look, there are just as many scientists that say it's real as say it's not." which simply is not even remotely true.

Also, people who believed the earth was flat didn't really have any scientific reason to believe otherwise. It was when people started to see reasons why it probably wasn't flat and then persue confirmation of this hypothesis that they discovered otherwise.There *is* something to be said for the fact that the overwhelming majority of the scientists who have looked at the evidence believe it is a problem. This is not simple gang-mentality we're talking about here.

[Country_Jake]

you mean to tell me that the world is not flat.... hmmmm.... that opens up all kind of new posablities....

[Dru]

If the world was flat that would be a good photo - someone cranking a one-arm off the edge.

[CleeshterFeeshter]

I did an International Law research project on transboundary pollution (acid rain). For every well researched scientific project discussing the existence and effects of acid rain;there were two projects (written by prostitutes) financed by the Western Fuels Association that said that it did not exist or if it did that it was good for us. This depsite the fact that rains were showing up in the NE USA wiht ph balances of 3.7

The point being that it is worthless to argue good science with the enemy. Every revolution needs it politcal thinkers, its financiers, and it bomb throwers. Nothing wrong with supporting the Kyoto treaty, paying membership to the Sierra Club or Nature Conservancy or killing the enemy. The American revolution had to start somewhere with gunshots.

[Country_Jake]

I wonder how much of an impact to the GW, all those bombs we droped on the affgannies, does this ever come up in the head office.... um well mr. president we can't just go over there and drop bombs cuase aaaahhh, well we will increase the amount of gas in the atmosphear, so you see there is no other choise but to let these poor dumbshit basterds die by the long term effects of Global Warming, we'll just have to starve them to death sir.... ya right....

[ 04-11-2002: Message edited by: Country Jake ]

[AlpineK]

I don't know Country, but I suspect you would have to drop a lot of bombs to equal American SUVs.

If the world were flat then don't you think that climbers would be setting up routes on the edge; and if that were the case then I bet this cliff study wouldf be a lot more important.

I think someone needs to take Doug climbing at Index or Squamish. I know where there were a bunch of routes that have been reclaimed by nature.

[Fairweather]

Homeostasis on a planetary scale?

[klenke]

This study has been completed.

[ 04-12-2002: Message edited by: klenke ]

[sayjay]

quote:

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Looks like you are one of those scientists who think that anthropogenic causes for global warming are the problem.

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Yes, I do believe that anthropogenic climate change is a problem. Because that's what the evidence tells me.

quote:

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For every one of you there is another who does not think what you think.

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Bullshit -- assuming "one of you" means people who have actually looked at the evidence. Maybe there's a balance of commentators/politicians but not scientists. You give me a list of scientists who think global warming is not a real and significant problem I'll give you back a list that is at least 100 times as long.

What is it that makes you think there are an equal number of scientists on either side of the fence? Simply that you've heard this said so many times?

quote:

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I personally don't know what I think and I said this in my original post on the top of page 5. You seem to have assumed that I don't think global warming is being caused by human hands. All I did was offer counter quotes from my ME Reference Manual, whose text is just as reasonable to take as gospel as what you say.

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Not if the ME Ref Manual can't back up its statements w/ relevant facts. (orange growing latitudes is not, by itself, a relevant fact). I base my arguments on large collections of evidence -- not all of which points in one direction, but the overwhelming majority of which points in that direction.

quote:

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When I said there was no proof that global warming is actually taking place, I should have been more specific and emphatic. What I should have said is there is no DEFINITIVE proof that global warming is ACTUALLY taking place and/or is the result of anthropogenic mechanisms. It could be taking place, but not by anthropogenic means, or it could not be taking place at all period.

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True, we cannot state with 100% confidence that g.w. is ACTUALLY taking place right now, though we can say it with very high confidence. How many things can you say with 100% confidence? Can you say with 100% confidence that if you jump out in the middle of I-5 at 5:00pm you'll get hit by a car? The concencus of the scientific community is that there is very very very small chance that nothing will happen (<5%), a very very big chance (>90%) that something will happen that will have a significant negative impact on the environment, people and the economy, and the possibility (likelihood unknown) that something really really bad will happen. I'm just not enough of a gambler to like those statistics -- and I think it's irresponsible for us to be running this experiment on the globe.

quote:

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Scientists do research and seek data to support their arguments. If they know where to look, they know how to find supportive arguments. Likewise, they can ignore unsupportive arguments. Ignoring unsupportive arguments or not looking at ALL the data available is what happens a lot in this world. Scientists want to look good and show that their intellectual hypothesis expounded upon in erudite circles was correct so they only seek supportive data. This happens quite a lot in the scientific community, I'm afraid (maybe 20 percent of them). Even scientists are shackled by the all-mighty dollar.

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I disagree with your level of scepticism about the objectivity of the scientific process, but that aside there are safeguards built into the system to keep scientists from presenting biased information. Publications have to go through a rigorous review process by other scientists, including those who don't agree with their starting premise. (This is true of journal publications; texts such as your ME book do not have to go through such a review process). The collection of resulting papers gives a pretty broad set of evidence that point in many directions. Every 5 years a large international panel of scientists gets together and reviews the full suite of reviewed journal articles and draws conclusions based on the collection of evidence. Counter to public opinion, the skeptics are included in this process, and the panel is not full of biased scientists. I personally know several who 10 yrs ago would have told you global warming was being blown way out of proportion and who now believe it is a problem, based on the evidence that has emerged.Oh, and scientist's primary goal is to find the truth; the fossil fuel's primary goal is to make money. And I've seen no evidence that scientists have a better chance of getting research funding if their research aims to show global warming is real than if it aims to show it is not.

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A note about cows: though I couldn't quote statistics, I'm thinking a great majority of cows in this world are used for dairy use not meat or leather, etc. True enough, though, we do eat them (but not in India where there are boat loads of them). We also eat snails.

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Right. I stand corrected. My point was only that there are so many cows cause there are so many people.

[mattp]

Alpine K, I would agree with your prioritizing a reduction in our oil consumption over undertaking extensive efforts to slow the destruction of cliff habitat. However, I think that we rock climbers have a special responsibility to pay attention to the impact we cause in the vertical world because we are directly responsible for a large part of the disruption of the cliffside ecology at the sites that we utilize (climate change, acid rain, logging, mining, and other factors are wreaking havoc in many of these areas as well).

If there are a limited number of crags along the Niagra Escarpment that attrack climbers' attention because these are the steepest and least vegetated cliffs, and if these same cliffs are those that are most valuable as an ecological reserve, we have an unfortunate situation where climbers may well find theirselves on the wrong end of an environmental debate. In that case I, for one, would not be opposed to a management policy that encourages or even perhaps requires climbing to be restricted to certain areas. I believe the question would be "how much restriction is warranted?"

Matt

[max]

As to CO2 concentrations...

http://amath.colorado.edu/courses/2350/2002Spr/HW/industrialCO2.jpg

This is ruthlessly ripped from "Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis" published for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change by Cambridge University Press. Yeah, it's not warming, but it sure looks like industrialization has influenced co2 levels.

As to who to believe: I believe people with more research experience in the field. All the researchers I've talked to (I'm in a math/atmospheric science grad program) seem to say global warming is here and humans are playing a statistically signifigant role in it. Peer review. Data and interpretations don't get published in the big journals without some serious scrutiny. BS doesn't fly.

[sayjay]

for anyone who's interested in the scientific concensus, there's a downloadable pdf available at:

http://www.ipcc.ch/pub/reports.htm

[DOUG_LARSON]

I almost hate to mention this, considering the response to our other work on this forum . We do dendrochonology on the ancient cliff trees and have produced some of the longest tree-ring chronologies for north america from these trees. The signal (2787 years long) clearly shows the warming and drying signal, but also shows past episodes that were equally large. I will not get into the debate about natural or anthropodenic climate change here. But I will point out that the trees on the cliffs generated the data. How many of these trees can we afford to lose to climbing? I don't know but at least we now know that the trees cannot benefit from recreational activity.

[DOUG_LARSON]

No, what we actually do is use the instrumental record for the past 140 or so years from stations immediately adjacent to the cliffs. Unlike chronologies from alpine areas out west, we have lots of stations in proximity to the cliffs and at the same altitude so their is no adiabatic effect. Then we create a master chronology by taking hundreds of cores from different microsites. We presume that the site specific and tree-specific effects will represent the noise in any signal that is there and then we statistically hunt for the common signal. We usually only admit trees to the chronology when 50% or more of the annual variance is correlated with the master chronology. The individual tree correlations have a common signal that goes as high as 80%. Once the master chronology is built, we then do a correlation analysis with as many factors in the 140 years worth or record as we can. IN the case of the cedar trees on the escarpment, it initially turned out that maximum summer (JUNE to AUG) temperatures of the previous year was the factor that best explained the chronology. Since that time, an even better fit has been produced for the long chronology (2787 yrs) based on the Palmer drought sensitivity index that combines data for both temp. and precip. The real problem with chronology construction is that we are formed to assume homology between recent climatic - physiological responses and historic ones. We have no evidence of evolutionary change in these relationships, but it is still a declared assumption that , if wrong, would invalidate the chronology as a proxy index of past climates. The pollen, sediment and ice cores suffer from the same problems so we're actually no worse off. Plus, our signals are patently annually resolvable - something that is hard to prove for ice, pollen or sediments.

[DOUG_LARSON]

Hi Fern,

could you give me the reference to this study. We study everything there is to know about cliffs.

Doug

[Dru]

If you sent an email to Howie Richardson directly howie@vip.net he might be able to help you out with that.

[Country_Jake]

What I want to know is why is there always something wrong.... I never here about the scientific studys where they say every thing looks great here... doin' a good job, way to go mother earth... why is it, there always has to be a change in the enviornment... And who say it needs to be changed... do we get to vote on a closer or what... or do enivormentalists who have a polotition in their pocket just get to decide because they think it should be so... I mean just because I think something is in a bad state, does not mean you do, or vice versa.... And if we do get to vote on closers, why isn't it more publicly campaned.... do the rest of you think that we should just sit back and let some tree hugers close down all our favorite spots, even though the majority of us do our best to keep it clean and nice for others (respectful climber and woodsmen)... Ok I'm a little excentric, but I'm serious too...

[erik]

quote:

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Originally posted by Country Jake:

What I want to know is why is there always something wrong.... I never here about the scientific studys where they say every thing looks great here... doin' a good job, way to go mother earth... why is it, there always has to be a change in the enviornment... And who say it needs to be changed... do we get to vote on a closer or what... or do enivormentalists who have a polotition in their pocket just get to decide because they think it should be so... I mean just because I think something is in a bad state, does not mean you do, or vice versa.... And if we do get to vote on closers, why isn't it more publicly campaned.... do the rest of you think that we should just sit back and let some tree hugers close down all our favorite spots, even though the majority of us do our best to keep it clean and nice for others (respectful climber and woodsmen)... Ok I'm a little excentric, but I'm serious too...

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JAKE, the problem you state is called christianity or probably orgainized religion for that matter.....it tells us that there is always something wrong and that we need to tell others what we see wrong with them too.....it is a brilliant way to control billions of people...even make them kill each other, over principals that if were looked at with any type of skepticism would be so laughable, that you would wonder how people could even get so deep into the bullshit....

but i really dunno

[Country_Jake]

Amen... No but really I think you got something here ... although I wouldn't narrow it down to just one religous organization... Its alll of them... I am spiretual, but don't belive in organized beliving...

[sayjay]

Hey Country Jake,

There are endless papers out there showing how mother earth is doing a great job, and about flourishing systems. It's not that scientists aren't looking at this stuff -- they have to to establish baselines and determine sensitivities. The thing is that papers of this sort are pretty ho-hum news, so the press doesn't cover them. As for enviro's, you only hear from them about what we're doing wrong because the whole point of their job is to try and right things they feel are being done wrong! I mean, you don't write to the city to tell them about how the street pavement in front of your house is in great shape -- you call them up and get on their case when it's full of potholes... right?